The electoral college just means that your vote counts for whichever party is predominant in your state, no matter what you actually voted for. The "predominant" party in your state is pretty arbitrary, though, depending upon how successful the parties are at gerrymandering: https://www.washingtonpost.com...

The US form of representative democracy is just an illusion to make you think your vote matters. US democracy is not intended to be just or fair... its only practical purpose is a safety valve to preserve itself by preventing a bloody revolution if one party becomes too unpopular.

schwit1 writes: A careful statistical analysis of when major earthquakes occur has suggested they are more likely to be more powerful if they occur around the full and new moons when tidal forces are at their peak.

Satoshi Ide, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues investigated three separate earthquake records covering Japan, California and the entire globe. For the 15 days leading up to each quake, the scientists assigned a number representing the relative tidal stress on that day, with 15 representing the highest. They found that large quakes such as those that hit Chile and Tohoku-Oki occurred near the time of maximum tidal strain — or during new and full moons when the Sun, Moon and Earth align.

For more than 10,000 earthquakes of around magnitude 5.5, the researchers found, an earthquake that began during a time of high tidal stress was more likely to grow to magnitude 8 or above.

As these results are based entirely on statistical evidence, not on any direct link between tidal forces and actual quakes, they are quite uncertain and unproven.

Yep, that jives with what I've heard from current and past Amazon employees.

Most last 1-2 years, because that's what it takes for the stock options to vest and so you can leave without having to pay back relocation assistance.

As far as corporate culture goes, they do have a problem with excessive middle management, and those are probably the ones that want to keep their employees physically close to them so they can watch them and keep their metrics up. There's a lot of internal competition and finger pointing. Brilliant friend of mine tried putting in for an internal transfer within Amazon, so then his manager put him on a probation plan to prevent losing him to another internal team. Then finally after they had a falling out over this, the manager had him dismissed as a scapegoat for some api outage. A bunch of his other Amazon friends had also gotten scapegoated as well, often for existing problems that they were trying fix, but had been hushed or postponed during planning meetings. Then when it finally dies, the manager has to choose a scapegoat or else lose their own position.

Plus, the only perk Amazon employees seem to have is location. They've built up a pretty nice urban campus in South Lake Union over the past few years, so young'uns can live and work in condos downtown with their little doggies... and that's about it. They offer few of the competitive perks offered by other Seattle area companies... in the name of frugality employees have to pay for their own coffee and beer in the lounge, and little stuff like that. I guess you get a free Prime membership, but not really any other lucrative "employee discounts" on stuff. So yeah, many, many employees just take the relocation money, hang on for the year or two that it takes to get out, and GTFO.

Like MS, Amazon is probably doing this on purpose to flood the local tech job economy with tech workers, to overall reduce the wages they have to pay the star software devs. The Seattle tech job market is still very tight, but all it would take is Amazon announcing a 5% layoff to completely bomb the market with tech jobseekers... though I'm not sure how much of a spike that would be from their normal attrition rate.

Read some expose on the warehouse work explaining how not great those jobs are.

Watched the Kiva Systems video. Doesn't look like they do all that much, they merely bring the shelves to the people, instead of making the people powerwalk out to the shelves. This allows them to pack the shelving more efficiently in warehouses, and will likely cut down a lot on workplace injuries. But doesn't seem like it will cut down all that drastically on the number of workers needed, they still need to grab and pack the shit.

Heh, and how many times did Google change how they do SMS in Android / ChromeOS ?

* SMS app* Buys Grand Central and allows people to use Google Voice for SMS via web and app (I still use this today, mostly)* Messages app* Hey, maybe SMS integration in Google+ ? Oh, wait, no one really uses it.* Hangouts app gets SMS integration on both web and app, and Google kinda starts deprecating all of the above.* Hangouts app loses SMS integration, now you should use the Messenger app* Oh, I guess people still use Google Voice, I suppose we might start maintaining it again until we decide to kill it for good.

I could never get into Pandora, but probably because my musical tastes are strange. I mostly listen to parodies, so when I insert stuff like Weird Al or Monty Python Sings or Capitol Steps or even King Missile, they really confuse the genre classification engine.

These days I mostly listen to curated streams, because I can't be bothered to come up with my own playlists. So usually SomaFM.com (Groove Salad, Lush, and sometimes Secret Agent or Defcon). I also like to hit http://sleepbot.com/ambience/b... on occasion , it can be really weird sometimes.Also I'm a bit surprised to find I have a soft spot for "female vocal dubstep" on youtube, but maybe that has something to do with the wallpaper pr0n.

Anyways, I used to use streamtuner + streamripper to, uh, "timeshift" a few hours' worth of streaming radio feeds so I could listen to them in the subway. These days, I usually just find the things I really like on youtube and download them with Tubemate, and then buy albums on Google Play if I really really like certain artists. But the only reason I spend money on Google Play is because I don't want to install any other music store app, and I can't fully remove Google Play.

Can't stand the Google Play auto streams that they throw at me, though.

Press2ToContinue writes: "The (tax) benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1%” of taxpayers, Congresswoman Gwen Moore says, “It’s a drop in the bucket.” Many states implement drug-testing programs to qualify for benefit programs so that states feel they are not wasting the value they dole out.

However, seven states who implemented drug testing for tax benefit program recipients spent $1m on drug testing from the inception of their programs through 2014. But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average – around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population – meaning there’s been little cost savings from the drug testing program. Why? “Probably because they can’t afford it,” say Moore.

“We might really save some money by drug-testing folks on Wall Street, who might have a little cocaine before they get their deal done,” she said, and proposes a bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000.

“We spend $81bn on everything – everything – that you could consider a poverty program,” she explained. But just by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income, a bit of the tax code far more likely to benefit the rich than the poor, “that’s a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains,” she added. Why not drug-test the rich to ensure they won't waste their tax benefits?

She is “sick and tired of the criminalization of poverty”. And, she added: “We’re not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off Snap. But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let’s start on the other end of the income spectrum.”

This. I think LinkedIn suddenly reached critical mass just a couple years ago. Before then, love it or hate it, everyone just kinda ignored it. Now I suddenly have so many former co-workers on it, that it's actually somewhat interesting to keep up with what they're all doing. It's big and functional enough that it's a rival to Facebook now, which is actually a pretty big deal. And unlike Facebook, I'm actually comfortable "friending" bosses and co-workers there without feeling that worlds are colliding with my decidedly unprofessional childhood friends and feeds that dominate F*book.

Plus, every big corporation I've worked for lately has tried to, er, "leverage internal synergies" through running their own internal enterprise social network site where people (or rather the corp. legal) can feel comfortable sharing proprietary activities. (like Yammer and the ilk that feel like poor clones of twitter/FB). I can see the LinkedIn acquisition playing well with ActiveDirectory, and keeping employees happily collaborating in the corporate walled-garden LinkedIn without being exposed to all of the external headhunters and snipers, while still allowing some limited cross-corporate interchange where allowed. Plus, now when you're outsourced, your HR can helpfully update your LinkedIn status for you to give you a jumpstart on finding your next opportunity!

Of course, all of the real techies I know ignore the internal social networks and Skype/Lync and have migrated all of their collaboration onto more IRC-esque tools, like Hipchat or Slack, where they can freely discuss and exchange CI and PR notifications and lots of cat gifs using chatbots. But, well, gradually M$ will catch on.

Belief in $Deity is a red herring. Any half-assed OkCupid profile probably does a pretty good job characterizing your upbringing and preferences. But if you have nothing, then people are simply just going to have to make Assumptions about you. "This guy is in my voter district, and I won the election, so this new law assisting/profiling/deterring immigrants is acting in his best known interests". Do you really align with your elected official? No. So take control of your own narrative before some shithead does it for you.

I went to an international school for a few years. It was a Catholic school in southeast asia, so they actually had religion classes as a required part of the curriculum. But you could choose to study Christianity or Buddhism or maybe a few other options, but if you didn't have something they put you into a "Values" class and it had a textbook. I don't really remember much from it other than a porny picture of two girls licking the same ice cream cone, but it was interesting to still try to consider and articulate the social impact of cooperation and ethics and conflict resolution. Here in the US, "share toys and keep your hands to yourself" seems to kinda drop off quickly after Kindergarten, so I suppose it was nice to keep thinking about that kind of thing several grades later, even if us kids didn't take it very seriously at the time.

But yes, you've got some way to characterize your upbringing. Maybe you grew up watching Mr. Rogers, or maybe had more of an urban Sesame Street cred, or hated Barney, or just grew up with the Nartuo way of the ninja. All that is going to have some impact on your cultural identity and perspective on other groups. Maybe it's just in your head now. But kids these days are growing up with their entire Netflix and Kindle viewing history in databases. It's going to get pretty difficult to assert that you're some kind of clean blank slate that can't be grouped into some sort of box of cultural misappropriations.